Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve - OMG! Ubuntu
www.omgubuntu.co.uk
Canonical may be ramping up its efforts to improve the Ubuntu gaming experience — yasss — but it seems their Steam snap package is causing a few headaches

Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”.

“We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues”, Besset adds, noting that “the best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to […] use the official .deb”.

Those who don’t want to use the official Deb package are instead asked to ‘consider the Flatpak version’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    2·
    10 months ago

    I don’t even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it’s probably not great that there are three competing formats for “applications with dependencies included”. It was supposed to be “package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use”, now it’s a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

    I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

    By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

    • firecat@kbin.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      Just tell the billion dollar company to allow people to download the games on their browser. The Client only exists as a means to DRM and analytics, there’s no actual reason for games not to become standalone.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        1·
        7 months ago

        That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”

        Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.

        Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)

        • firecat@kbin.social
          0·
          10 months ago

          As someone who was during those times, your Zgen knowledge is very incorrect. The games did work, including Crisis (original). As to why the myth you hear from fellow Zgen gamers; it’s because graphics cards were invented. Brand new, no one knew what they were doing with them. The companys Renzen and Nvidia started sponsoring games, it’s how they became popular, their logos were part of the game, Metal Gear Solid revengeance is proof of this.

          Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform. Dell made wild target before Valve Corporation was founded. Lootbox was invented before Steam launched it, Yahoo games (anyone remember them) in japan had the concept down to almost todays standards. Valve had nothing to do with gaming history, they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
            1·
            10 months ago

            Steam had no part in gaming history, they were not the first online platform.

            Lmao. This is like saying the iPhone or iPad had no part in smartphone/tablet history, because neither were first to the market. It’s a ludicrous take.

            Valve had nothing to do with gaming history

            Lol

            they are just known for their lawsuits and anti competitive behavior.

            I’m willing to bet this isn’t true lol. Valve is only known for anti-competitive behaviour? Come off it.

  • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)@badatbeing.socialEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure Canonical’s neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again…then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.

  • krellor@kbin.social
    1·
    10 months ago

    The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn’t an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn’t include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      10 months ago

      Honestly, that seems like the nicest way to solve the problem. Afaik Valve would be fully within their rights to C&D them from unofficially rehosting their binaries. In any other situation, that would be a blatant security risk.

  • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Would be cool if they just straight up supported flatpaks. That’s been my main way of gaming for a couple years now, and it works great. The downside is that the folder structure is confusing so it makes things like modding pretty difficult.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m really hoping this all forces Ubuntu out as the face of desktop Linux.

    It’s been pretty low tier for years now, and Canonical just proves corporate backing doesn’t guarantee a good distro.

    Snap is pretty garbage, default GNOME is horrendous, the repos break every other month, apt is still pretty lame despite being an user upgrade for apt-get, the packages are neither stable nor cutting edge, they change core OS backends like every update which breaks configs and makes documentation obsolete.

    I’d like to suggest Fedora as the new goto, but I feel like it’s a bit too privacy and FOSS oriented which may scare away new users.

    Debian is great but it doesn’t have latest packages which isn’t optimal as performance upgrades would take time to release or need to be manually installed.

    • LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world
      01·
      10 months ago

      unfortunately, industry loves shit like Ubuntu and RHEL because of their corporate backing. comps love having the insurance of someone to blame or somebody to fix their shit when things hit the fan. I’ve worked for many comps who choose RHEL for that alone. Should we choose the OS built by a bunch of randos in their basement, or something backed by Red Hat where I can just pay them money to handle my support tickets faster if shit blows up? or who tf do I have my cyber liabilities insurance guys sue if the OS has a huge fuckin problem? I want a company behind that shit.

  • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    Who the fuck was asking for a Steam Snap.

    JFC

    Give up on snaps. It’s not gonna happen. Whatever benefits they claim they could provide could be merged into Flatpak and everyone wins.

    • xe3@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      Flatpak is not designed to solve all the same problems as snap they have very different scopes and goals. It’s really only Linux hobbyists that see these as comparable technologies.

      Also the Steam flatpak is unofficial just like the snap, they would be unwilling to support flatpak issues as well.